Reishi is the one people ask us about in the evening. This page says what it is, where ours comes from, and how people take it. It does not tell you what it will do to your sleep, and the reason for that is at the bottom.
What Reishi is
Reishi is a lacquered shelf fungus that grows on wood. In Chinese tradition it is lingzhi and in Japanese tradition reishi, and both traditions have written about it for a very long time. The old name that gets repeated most is "the mushroom of immortality", which is a piece of history rather than a description of what it does.
Half of ours is wild-foraged in Michigan by the partner who does our wildcrafting. The other half we grow here in New Smyrna, from a clone taken from a wild Florida specimen.
How we make it
We extract whole fruiting bodies. The process is a triple-fraction, multi-phase exhaustive extraction using ultrasound, with a high-pressure hot-water fraction, and the base is pure water with no alcohol in it. The finished extract is nano-encapsulated.
That is the same process behind everything we make, and it exists because our own first batch was alcohol based and a customer at the booth told Andrew it was hard to take. If it is hard to take, you will not take it every day.
How people take it
One 1ml serving in cold water, in the evening. Most people who buy it make it part of whatever they already do at the end of the day rather than treating it as a separate thing to remember. You can find it in our Reishi Triple Extract, and it is also the night half of the Day & Night Shroom Stack.
What we do not claim
We make no claim that Reishi improves your sleep. An earlier version of this page described sleep stages and the mechanisms by which Reishi was said to act on them. We went back through what we actually hold on Reishi and sleep, and none of it is evidence we are willing to put in front of you: what exists is animal work, and the human material does not support a claim about a person.
If that changes, we will write it up here and say plainly what the study measured, in whom, and what preparation it used. If you take medication or have a health condition, talk to your doctor before adding anything new.
The ordinary things that help
None of this is about mushrooms. It is the boring advice, and it is boring because it is well established: keep your caffeine to the earlier part of the day, eat your last real meal a while before bed, and put the screens down before you want to be asleep rather than at the moment you do.
More on Reishi
There is more about the mushroom itself on our Reishi page, and you can meet us and taste it at any of our farmers markets.
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